Song in a Room Without Light

I wasn’t okay, but I got good at performing the illusion, which made me an ideal freshman and unfit to survive. I escaped a small town by playing dead. I earned high grades, played a good kid, kept my voice tucked low. When I reached the university, no one looked twice. I dissolved into lecture halls and tried to stay visible enough not to vanish, quiet enough not to be pulled apart.

Then The Used happened.

It wasn’t the lyrics per se. It was the way Bert screamed like his lungs had been flayed from the inside. It was the sound of someone else being too much and not enough at once, and All That I’ve Got was the song I played until it burned. I wanted it to burn. That was the point.

I believed I didn’t have a support system. I had a Myspace login. I posted the song, and someone messaged me “same.” That was enough. That was church. That was the first time someone didn’t flinch when I showed them what I couldn’t say out loud.

I was cutting in secret and measuring worth in missed meals and straight A’s, shrinking myself with the hope that if I got small enough, sharp enough, nearly invisible, someone might see the wound and pull me free like a splinter, but no one came with gentleness, only Bert, who didn’t save me so much as scream beside me until the sound filled my limbs and taught them how to move again.

The chorus felt like CPR.

“I’ll be just fine pretending I’m not, I’m far from lonely and it’s all that I’ve got.”

It entered like smoke into a collapsed lung and settled there, not to heal but to hum in the hollow, a sound that never asked to be beautiful, only bearable, a song meant for the ones who kept eye contact while disappearing, who carried silence like coursework, who passed for functional because no one looked closely.

I wasn’t emo for the fashion. I was emo because it was either that or break something I couldn’t put back together. MCR came later. The Black Parade rolled in with its staged grief and gave me somewhere to collapse for four minutes. But The Used came first. They didn’t save me. They just made the dark feel crowded enough that I didn’t vanish inside it.

This song wasn’t a cure but it was a companion. It sat beside me on the bathroom floor. It showed up in the back row of that lecture where I didn’t speak for six weeks. It lived in my cheap headphones and stitched itself into the parts of me I didn’t let anyone see.

Sometimes I still hear it. I hear it when I’m tired, when I’m wired, or when I pass the dorm where I first understood I wasn’t alone. Music doesn’t save you. But it can hold the door open long enough for you to crawl through.

And sometimes that’s enough.